veja.vis project @ Digital Humanities 2012

Description of the project:The increasing capacity of computational data analysis is driving computer scientists and designers into the development of new features to visualize and understand cultural artifacts in a different manner. Social scientists, digital humanities researchers are investigating how to create what we can call "cultural algorithms" to discover or reveal new trends about a field of investigation that can be related to film studies, literature, communication and so on and so forth. Following the theoretical approach created by Lev Manovich about his studies related to "cultural analytics", this paper will present a one year research on the visualization of the entire collection of covers of the Veja magazine, considered the most important weekly magazine in Brazil. The visualization that we created in our Lab at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (www.ufjf.br/sws) analyses and demonstrates practical uses for cultural visualization, since we can have critical analytical details about all the covers such as the gender that is more frequent in the covers (masculine), the colors that the magazine uses regularly etc. We can also use image recognition algorithms so we can cross data with wikipedia, for example, and discover who was more frequently featured in the covers: e.g. politicians or media stars.The project is coordinated by Cicero Silva and Marcio Santos. Images by Marcio Santos.